#Operation Barbarossa Discourse Blog

[centrally-unplanned]

Do you think Germany could have won on the Eastern front?

Finished Stahel's Kiev book, which is basically more of the same from Barbarossa. He seems like he feels the need to prove Germany couldn't win, not just that he believes it and argues why.

From Tooze we know German war production was geared to aircraft well prior to Barbarossa, and Hitler refused to release large numbers of extra tanks until right before Typhoon. So there's at least some slack here.

I wish he turned the question around, asked what it would take to knock out the USSR, then see if Germany could've managed it.

~Woo Stahel posting! He is definitely a fun read regardless of if one agrees or doesn't. I am infamous for being a Barbarossa truther, I think Germany definitely "could have won" in the East. But of course, it is all around what we mean by that. If I was isekai'd into the head Third Reich in July of 1940 with a cadre of mutuals wielding absolutely authority, could I have beat the Soviets? Absolutely, none could possibly resist my strategic genius, honed on endless rounds of Hearts of Iron & Lesswrong blog posts. But that isn't a realistic scenario right, that isn't going to happen; Nazi Germany didn't have nearly enough hot elf chicks to attract any isekai protagonist portals, for one. We need to be specific here.

I tend to think the material constraints are definitely not overwhelming, the Nazis had a ton of slack. You mention the withheld reserves, and as you know from Stahel's earlier works the entire operation was run on blindly optimistic assumptions, the simple idea that a massive operational victory would usher in complete collapse, and so reserves were unnecessary. A me-at-the-helm Germany with no extra magical resources could still have had double the tank numbers, double the planes, probably a solidly higher cadre of rolling stock for resupply, and certainly things like better winter equipment (there would be hard limits, like truck supply isn't getting much higher I don't think). Something I have often highlighted is that while the Germans were "fuel constrained" it was with a policy of keeping fuel in reserve in large quantities, they were not close to the bottom in 1941. If they treated 1941 as "maximal effort, do-or-die", as I think they should to exploit their real-but-definitionally-temporary doctrinal-tactical advantage, they could not only have had bulkier armored formations and more supply "units" but ran more units in the field at the same time and for harsher tempos - part of why they didn't "field more tanks" is that they thought they were at their supply cap, but that was a policy choice.

I think you in other posts have shown you read the recent ACX review of How The War War Won, a stellar book. They mention in that review that the Germans had as many people working in airplane manufacturing as the US did in late war - of course making far less planes. But still, that was far higher than they were in 1941! Those people generally existed then, many were Soviet POWs but by no means all. Germany "woke up" to the stakes of their war in 1942, and began much more intensive economic mobilization then; nothing material was stopping that sooner.

Something that the Battle of Kiev also breaks down is a common idea that the Nazi operational advantage was predominantly in the surprise of the opening operation, that all their units were pristine and executing long-rehearsed plans, and that the path of Barbarossa was a sort of inevitable fade of that surprise. There is truth in that of course but Kiev was well after the surprise had worn off, and using units that on the Nazi's own operational charts said were so shredded as to be "unfit for offensive operations". And they still pulled off the greatest operational victory Nazi Germany ever achieved anyway. So much of Stahel's (very impressive and valuable) work is listing out like August 1941 memos and diary entries about how the Mud Sea of the Russian Steppe and the endless hordes of Soviet bodies had burned down the spirit of the soldiers, and how all the German officers were getting into fistfights with each other over a broken operational plan they had to pivot on the fly. But they kept winning, so?

Something I will criticize Stahel for is that, to make his case work, he needs Kiev to be exceptional, which he finds in Stalin's idiocy and meddling, making it a battle that should never have happened, that any sane leader would have averted. And Stalin is no strategic genius, for sure. But the case is way too strong - it rests on the hindsight 20/20 idea that the Soviet Union could just toss aside the economic assets of the Ukraine and just go on fighting. We know that that happened, that they could do that. But their victory masks how close to economic collapse they got, the days the spent on starvation-level calories building tanks that broke down after a single battle while running their rail stock and truck fleet into the ground. Perhaps, to not get into it right now, to only be bailed out by Lend Lease, the scale of which in 1941 the USSR could not have bet its horse on. He presents an overly rosy view of the idea of "strategic retreat" that the reality of war and internal Soviet thinking doesn't quite match.

Which is all to say that, under many timelines, the Nazis would have found victories like Kiev, and the Soviet leadership was not comically stupid. Our scenario of victory does no rely on a rigged game of the Nazi leadership becoming ubermensch while the Soviet rats witlessly scurry about their sinking ship or anything. I do think that a Nazi leadership that took the Soviets seriously, prepped intensively, understood the stakes that failing to achieve a quick victory meant a two-front war with probably the US on England's side, a war where they would be outnumbered 5 to 1, and so any price to boost the odds was worth paying, could have at least set themselves up for something like a win. Not guaranteed or anything, maybe not even 50% odds, but a solid chance.

Okay this went way longer than I expected, so to wrap it up quickly the next level is to ask - could the existing Nazi leadership have realized that? Can I kill off or brain-transplant just like few people and change how they operate enough while still keeping them as coherently the same entity? And I think to that the answer is probably not. I'll set aside the long case here, but you know it from reading Stahel - they had awful infrastructure for strategic planning, the median think tank today has a bigger staff than OKW did, they had ideological blinders on Soviet capabilities which they could not shed pre-first blood, etc.

And more importantly, in 1941 they were winning. They seemed safe, they seemed fine. Like, all that 1942 mobilization of the economy? It was done in part via mass-scale slavery and forced starvation. Something the Nazis were perfectly willing to do in 1943! But after they had just conquered Paris? Telling its new allies in Romania or whatever "hey we conquered Europe but our situation is so desperate we need forced labor battalions to man the Skoda Works factories"? This just isn't how politics works, no combatant did that in World War Two. The Allies in their ludicrous industrial might could afford that mistake; the Axis, trying to thread the needle of victory through the miracle eye of unlikely probabilities, could not. I don't think getting so deft a strategic tailor at the helm of the Nazi strategy was in the cards in 1941 in any of the "adjacent" timelines. You would need something pretty big to shift.